News and views about the implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009 and other legislation, schemes and policies impacting the Right to Education of India's Children.

The free lunch that works

For a programme so vital to the health of India's children, the death
of 22 children in Chapra is a nightmare that has come to life. It is
unfortunate that it takes a heart-wrenching tragedy to wake up India's
middle classes to the situation faced by the poor on a daily basis. Can
this calamity shake us up enough to ensure that our future generations
live a healthy life? The midday meal (MDM) is an irreplaceable and
crucial programme with the potential to provide food and nutrition
inputs to most deserving and vulnerable sections of our population. This
disaster was certainly avoidable, and accountability must be fixed. But
we cannot allow this to descend into a cynical political blamegame.
Over 10 crore of our children need this meal in more ways than we can
imagine. We owe it to them to act together, and immediately transform
this programme into something that truly delivers and is regularly
discussed for all the right reasons.
The truth is that eradicating hunger and malnutrition of our
children is still not a public priority. While some states like Tamil
Nadu have a long history of providing cooked midday meals in schools, it
took a Supreme Court order in 2001 to universalise the MDM programme.
Under the right to food case, the SC ordered that every child in a
government primary school must be given a hot cooked meal on every
school working day. This replaced the utterly unimaginative and
inadequate system of giving 3 kg foodgrain to the child to carry home at
the end of the month.
Despite the wonder of watching a programme on a grand scale take
shape based on a court order, the provision of school meals is
implemented in at least 169 countries. The unmatched strategic value of a
balanced nutritious meal in contributing to the education, health and
nutrition of children has been documented by various studies across the
world. Countries such as Brazil have pioneered in providing diverse
school meals that include meat, vegetables and fruit, often sourced from
local farmers.
The MDM scheme in our country reaches out to over 11 crore
children across 12 lakh schools, employing about 24 lakh women as cooks
and helpers. The scheme has multiple advantages. It encourages enrolment
and attendance, addresses classroom hunger and even in better-off
households, frees up working mothers from having to pack lunch. MDMs can
also help dismantle untouchability, by ensuring children from different
castes and backgrounds sit together, understand basic hygiene and eat
food cooked by people from otherwise marginalised communities. It is
also a great place to involve parents in the collective health of their
children.
Despite its many problems and limitations, the MDM has proved
popular with children and parents alike. Here are the basics: the
Central government provides 100 gm of foodgrain per child per day. Rs
3.11 is what is provisioned to turn that into a nutritious meal, in a
3:1 Centre-state ratio. Many states make additional contributions to
improve the quality of the meal. Orissa adds 0.50 paisa, Rajasthan gives
a fruit once a week, and Puducherry even gives milk. Tamil Nadu, Andhra
Pradesh, Kerala, Delhi, Orissa and Chhattisgarh provide eggs. Tamil
Nadu tops the list with an additional contribution of Rs 3.83 per child
per day, which enables an egg a day, and much more.
The current national norms are not adequate for providing a
nutritious meal to children. Inflation undermines the little that has
been allocated. An evaluation by the Planning Commission in 2010 found
the scheme very useful, but there are major gaps in infrastructure and
delivery mechanisms. A parliamentary standing committee report from
April this year also raises concerns related to quality of the meal and
the fact that only 63 per cent of the kitchen-cum-stores sanctioned
since 2006-07 have been constructed. Effective monitoring and grievance
redress mechanisms would help better utilise meagre resources, but these
are absent in most places. Norms for transparency are not strictly
enforced.
It is worrying that instead of discussing how the system can be
fixed, in reaction to the Bihar tragedy, some people are suggesting cash
transfers instead of food, or the replacement of a locally made hot
meal with centralised kitchens. We cannot continue to look for the easy
escape from governance failures.
These gaps need to be addressed — now. In doing so, the standards
of states such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu have to be made the norm, and
improved upon. Parent and community-based school management committees,
mandated under the RTE, must be immediately established and involved in
monitoring the quality of not just the MDMs but schools as a whole.
Social audits of the scheme, as piloted in Andhra by the state social
audit directorate, have already shown great potential to provide an
effective platform for citizen-monitoring. Assigning monitoring
responsibilities to officials at all levels from the village, block,
district and state, as seen in Tamil Nadu, must be replicated. The MDM
scheme also needs an effective grievance redress mechanism.
With a combination of political will, administrative
accountability and personal responsibility, we can deliver. The national
food security ordinance will hopefully be discussed by Parliament in a
few weeks. In its current form, it incorporates provisions for MDMs at
existing levels. Can we insist these be increased by providing a total
of up to Rs 10 per child, per day in a 3:1 Centre-state ratio, without
being told that our economy will collapse and our credit ratings will
fall? Immediate passage of the grievance redress bill pending in
Parliament can help by setting up an independent and decentralised
mechanism where complaints are addressed effectively and in a time-bound
manner. Apart from these legislative and administrative measures,
nothing will help more than each of us promising to give an hour a week
to our local government school, and helping in the MDM. A good quality
MDM can go a long way in ensuring at least a part of the children's
right to food. Our money, time and attention can make all the
difference.
Sinha, with the Public Health Resource Network, is associated
with the Right to Food Campaign. Dey works with the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti
Sangathan and various rights-based campaigns